Holidays are a time for taking photos and sharing them with family and friends.

But the rapid spread of camera-equipped smartphones has inspired a confusing array of sharing options, as new services and app makers dream up features to gain an edge on rivals.

Here’s a roadmap of some of the services and what they offer:

ICLOUD

With an iPhone, some of choices have already been made for you. Apple’s free iCloud service has a built-in feature called “Photo Stream,” which is designed to synchronize the photos customers take on their phones with the photo albums on their iPads and computers.

Snap a photo, and it’s instantly beamed to Apple’s iCloud servers, and then down again to any other devices signed in with the same iCloud account. Apple also allows customers to share their photos with other iDevice-wielding friends.

One potential drawback is is that the service is primarily built for Apple users; if a household has a mix of devices running Apple Google or Microsoft software, synchronizing photos between them using iCloud isn’t so easy. Apple, for its part, has built software to connect iCloud to many of the computers running Microsoft’s Windows, but those powered by Google’s Android aren’t so lucky.

Apple has made it easier in recent months to share photos, however, allowing customers to create photo collection websites with the company’s trademark ease.

SOCIAL NETWORKS

Those more focused on the sharing end of photography might want to consider social networks, like Facebook, Google+ or Tumblr. Each of these are built not only to aggregate photos easily and for free, but they also make it very easy to share these photos with scores of people, no matter what type of devices they own.

They also sometimes reduce the quality of the photos in an effort to make them easy to share, however. So, if family members want a copy of that photo to print and put in a frame, they may want to consider another option.

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PHOTO NETWORKS

More specialized equivalents have also emerged for people who really love photos. These services include Facebook’s Instagram and Yahoo 's Flickr.

Instagram became popular for its quick sharing to other social networks and for its filters, which can transform a normal photo with artistic flourish. The filters can make the photo look like it was taken with a very old camera, or emphasize a set of colors that otherwise would blend in more easily. The network has grown quickly and is well known among the technology industry, especially after Facebook purchased it in a deal worth $1 billion at the time.

But Instagram saves photos in lower resolution than the original snapshot to conserve data-storage space, meaning a large printout may not look as nice as what’s on the screen. The service has also come under fire recently for concerns over the way it will handle customer’s information.

One of the most popular alternatives to Instagram is the Yahoo-owned service Flickr. This service allows customers to upload their photo collections and share them with friends, including by sending them to Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr. It keeps the original file size, too.

Flickr doesn’t have the modern polished look of the others. It also displays photographer-oriented information–like shutter speed and aperture–elements not many smartphone owners think or care about.

The service also has the unique distinction of offering limited access to customers before asking them to pay for a subscription. Serious photographers tend to be the ones that pay up.